Mile High (3 page)

Any boy's ambition modifies as he grows older. The year Paddy landed was the year of the appointment of the first American representative to the Vatican, and he dreamed of parading past the Swiss Guards in silk knickerbockers. However, by 1856, after fighting in the forces of Mayor Fernando Wood, Paddy had worked himself along in the party councils at least far enough so that he made seventeen hundred dollars out of securing, but not serving, writs of condemnation of the new Elevated Railway Company, and six hundred and fifteen dollars as the professional friend of the workers in the shoe industry. He was among the first one hundred members of the Order of the Knights of St. Crispin, formed to protect the seniority rights of shoemakers against cheap competition from beginners. Paddy opened his first saloon in the sixties (which, in 1878, became the first saloon in the nation to install electric light). When George Leslie robbed the Manhattan Savings Bank of $3,000,000 in broad daylight, although two of Leslie's men went to jail for it, Paddy West saw to it that Leslie was not brought to trial, because of “lack of evidence.” Paddy was becoming one of the men to see in New York government.

But when Ma Steinet died in 1860 Paddy was just getting started. He was twenty-eight years old. He was managing all three of the Steinet boardinghouses, all fourteen runners, three draymen, five boatmen, seven slop shops that sold the seamen the gear that the boardinghouse master stole from them before they were drugged and shipped out. He was shipping master, i.e., employment agent-crimp, for twenty-six shipping companies. Ma went feeble three years before the end. She was bedridden. She told Paddy she loved him like a son, then spat on the floor beside the bed and smiled at him as coyly as a young lover. She knew to a dime how much her business brought in. She told him that if he would keep his stealing down to not more than 20 percent, she would leave him the whole business and the “goodwill.” He was stealing 55 percent. He asked her if she'd put the intention in writing. She declined. She maintained sensitively that signing a paper such as that could only help her to die more quickly, and again she was pleased with him because he didn't bother to express horror at such a thought.

“If you don't trust me, who can you trust?”

“Me brass knucks,” Ma said wanly.

“Would you trust a judge?”

“Are you daft?”

“Supposin' I can figure out a way that will keep you safe?”

“How?”

“Supposin' the biggest bank in the city was in charge of the paper, and this bank had to be satisfied you died a natural death—?”

“A bank is only men, Paddy.”

“But there has to be a way!” His voice went harsh. It frightened her. Her breathing became disordered again, because one of her troubles was that she took in more air than she gave out—the cardinal rule with everything else in her life. “I got a sister in Perth Amboy,” she wheezed. “She has two sons. One is a doctor and I wish—I wish—”

“Whaddaye wish, Ma?”

“Never mind. Maybe I wish I had two sons in Perth Amboy.”

That amused Paddy but not to the point of smiling. He laughed. It was a quick single sound as though a hand had been caught in a slammed cash drawer. “If you had two sons,” he said, “they'da been shanghaied twice by now.”

She cackled gratefully over the compliment, then worked on trying to breathe again. “If I signed it, it would have to say that I leave three thousand dollars to each boy and four thousand to my sister plus my jewelry.” She nearly winced at the look in his eyes.

“What jewelry?” he asked.

“Where you can't find it.”

“All right. You accept the two boys.”

“I accept the two boys
with
the biggest bank. And I write the paper. No lawyers. And the paper has to say that you have to work for me until I die no matter how long it takes and that I have to die natural or you get nothing.”

Paddy stood up. His menacing bedside manner was gone. “I'll get the pen and paper. You decide which bank. Then I'll be off to Perth Amboy. And I want to say this. I appreciate it. I won't take you for no twenty percent. Five percent, no more, and that's settled.”

She managed a two-tone sigh. “Just don't steal more than twenty percent, Paddy, and I got a good deal.”

After Ma died Paddy set his course for politics as though he were pulling Engine Number Six. He leased the three boardinghouses to Charley Gleason. He sold the slop shops to Larry Meagher, and over the twenty-two years with Ma and his bands of fancy girls and his various overrides he had saved forty-one thousand dollars and he now owned leases and buildings and land. When he burned the boardinghouses that stood between Fulton and Wall Streets after the leases expired, he collected another three thousand in insurance. He built tenements on the land with a good bank loan that the Party arranged for him at fair rates.

Paddy's first leader at Tammany Hall was Fernando Wood. Then he prospered under his old fire captain, Bill Tweed, then moved along to Honest John Kelly, Squire Croker and Mr. Murphy. They had all been great men, each in a different way, none as great as the greatest, Aaron Burr. He served them all with pride and pleasure, staying well back, out of sight as much as possible. He opened the first of his string of saloons in Franklin Street, just across Center Street from the Tombs prison and the Criminal Courts Building, which Bill Tweed had built for the city at a cost exceeding the original estimate of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars by twelve million, two hundred and fifty thousand. Bill Tweed knew, and proved it to Paddy West with a finger pointing to the careers of Commodore Vanderbilt, Mr. Astor and Jay Gould, that this was the American way, and a man was nothing without his money.

Paddy knew that money was respectability, politics was power, and power was money. His visible movements held no more expression than his face as he went on his way to acquire all these. He taught the art of silence and invisibility to his son years later. “Let them others have all the fame and take all the risks,” he counseled daily. He would have little Eddie write lists of sentences like that fifty times every evening. He offered the boy a bonus of two dollars a month when Eddie was nine years old if he could remain silent and unsmiling and speak only to answer questions, and the boy collected from his delighted father month after month. Paddy was the hardest kind of hard Irish and he wanted his boy to carry that on. Eddie was raised as another kind of foreigner by his mother, a startlingly, even shockingly, different kind of foreigner. But his father's way was stronger, and the boy grew up to be a Kerry man surviving in the midst of famine; a hard, alien thinker who was pleased to have all others indulge their emotions.

Paddy settled the bands of girls into the first of his three brothels, then expanded. The houses were placed in the gay districts, each in a building with one of his saloons. After he got the saloons going, Big Tim Sullivan gave him “the license” to open his first gambling setup. It prospered from the start. However, the hub of hubs, the diadem center of all of his life's work, was the Franklin Street saloon, which became one of the most famous saloons in the city from the day it opened in 1871. By 1880 it was
the
gathering place for all the big politicians and gangsters; prizefighters, judges and jockeys; prosecutors and defense lawyers; pimps, con men, bail bondsmen and leading actors. Paddy presided over all of it, approachable but unsmiling, thick-lipped and thick-limbed, the guardian of Tammany's prestige and power at the doorway to the Tombs.

It was his cardinal rule that every alternative had to be investigated before he turned anyone down, and the
only
reason for refusing, in every instance, was disloyalty. Every morning at nine he dressed in a black suit with a black vest and a black tie on a white shirt with a high celluloid collar and climbed into the original old hack owned by Jiggs Tobin (whose loyalty was of the highest) and was driven from his house in Oliver Street to the corner three blocks north of the Franklin Street saloon, where, rain and shine, he would step down daintily from the cab and walk with slow majesty along the street, distributing largesse as he went—twenty dollars' worth of nickels, dimes and quarters.

He entered his saloon, walked up one flight of stairs to the small, nearly bare, office with its picture of Aaron Burr, the current Tammany leader and the incumbent cardinal. He ran everything from there even though, as district leader, his political headquarters was on Madison Street. One day a week he ate lunch in Mulberry Street, always the same: that raw ham, spaghetti with the meat and tomato gravy, no wine, one coffee. One other day each week he ate lunch in Rivington Street, always the same: some of that cold fish, boiled beef, some boiled carrots, a little more boiled beef and one coffee. He wanted the voters and the gangs to see him, to see that he wasn't one of those who favored the Irish. During peak business hours he presided over the barroom, always available. Throughout the winter he attended the important fires in his district and saw that the burned-out were housed by his block captains and clothed and fed. He handled the drunks and the dispossess cases personally in the courts and attended weddings, funerals and bar mitzvahs.

He was a flannel-mouthed, burly fairy godfather to all who were loyal. He got the boys out of jail. He saved them from hanging—until January 1, 1889, when he began to save them from the electric chair. He never refused a touch. He never forgot to collect interest on the touch. He was for the city. He helped get the subway built after having gotten the contractors' applications turned down. He did as much for builders, lawyers, cops, judges, businessmen and bankers as he ever did for the criminal element. He was a community leader in the greatest democracy, all of it exquisitely organized precisely along the lines of the church itself by Honest John Kelly, one of the best of them. The individual's vote was captured by the tenement captain, who reported it to the block captain. All the block captains were members of the election district committee and accountable to an election district captain. In the church chain this was much like an altar boy helping the parish priest, who reported to the bishop (the election district captain), who reported to Paddy West, district leader, the equivalent of a cardinal. He reported to the executive committee of Tammany Hall, the city's Curia, together with thirty-three other district leaders, and directly to the Leader of Tammany himself, their pope. All of them along the chain handed out bail money, Christmas turkeys, coal, jobs, justice, and clothes in return for votes and loyalty.

The birthday of Columbus had been a Tammany holiday celebrated long before Tammany encouraged that it be taken over by Italo-Americans. Paddy always made it his policy to celebrate this day exclusively with Italian voters. On October 12, 1887, as Patron and Grand Marshal of the annual Columbus Day ball, when he was fifty-five years old, Paddy West, a bachelor, first rested his eyes on Maria Corrente.

He was seated with friends, runners and lobbygows along the wall of the ballroom when she danced past him, fluidly correct in the arms of her father, Giuseppe Corrente, a leading importer of olive oil and cheeses. The room had been splashed with bunting in the colors of the Italian and American flags. Planks on sawhorses, covered with pastel crepe paper, bore up under pyramids of ham and cheese sandwiches, piles of glistening sugar cakes. Among these stacks waiters worked to fill pitchers and glasses with new red wine. The music was loud and happy. The children ran at top speed in and out among the dancers.

She was beautiful, strikingly Italianate, with a fulfilling loveliness of full body and an ivory-cast, haughty face. Her hair and eyes were very black. She was aware of dignity. He longed to see her smile, to see a burst of white teeth beneath those soft-seeming lips. But she did not smile. She seemed altogether remarkable to him, perhaps because of some quirk of digestion or twist of light or canting of sound and time. He felt himself breathing differently. He tried to understand it. He was fifty-five years old and these rushing feelings were neither pleasant nor welcome. It must be the light that made him see her this way. But everyone else looked as they always had, the beauties and the deformed. It is always the approaches of light that show beauty to the mind and the memory, then seal it there irrevocably, to be recalled whenever the present is too much to bear.

He rummaged through his mind and tossed what had passed for emotions out of the neatly kept portmanteau of his feelings, all folded neatly, but he could find nothing to match what he was feeling now as he conjured the sounds of her voice and the smells of her body. She was unique to him because no one or anything had ever gripped and twisted him into such a strange and frightening shape before, like some dopey swain with iron balls and a bleat built-in to voice and glance—a thing that brought laughter to the world. By dancing past him she had removed him unfairly from his husk as a powerful chief, a man who walked anywhere with plopping heavy feet if he chose to do so, but toward whom all others stepped lightly and with deference. She had risen from beneath the surface of time—which he had always controlled, beyond (perhaps) growing a bit older each year, but never seriously so—summoning his wistful lust and confounding his plans. She had frozen him in time: he was wearing the head of a much older man like a mask covering the face of a boy her age. She was too young, she was too beautiful, or whatever it was she was that was doing all this to him. He could not discern who and what might be mocking him.

Paddy West had set world's records for caution in his time. With him it had never been a matter of moving when the road ahead had been cleared. It was his fixed policy to refuse to move until the road ahead had been paved, brilliantly lighted, and a golden city settled at the other end of it. Then, with an armed police escort before him and behind him, he would be on his way. But this girl was beyond these rules. He spoke in a choked voice to Vincent Stoppaglieri, a Brooklyn contractor, seated at his right. “Who's that girl?” He kept his voice bored. It was a polite inquiry, as though he had decided he must show some interest in the events of the evening.